“I knew that George R.R. Martin had written a few episodes of ‘Game of Thrones,’ and I was very jealous,” Stephen King told the LA Times. Now King has written the Season 2 premiere of Under the Dome, the CBS TV series based on his 2009 novel.

The episode — with its rather Thrones-like title “Heads Will Roll” — airs June 30. King also makes a cameo appearance.

He outlined some topics the show will explore in Season 2:

“For me, the most interesting idea is this Malthusian concept that there’s too many people and too little space, there’s starting to be this talk about euthanasia and thinning of the herd, and that’s a scary idea,” said King… “In a fantasy series, you have a chance to tackle some of these hot-button issues, and people will accept it, because it’s only make-believe.”

The notoriously prolific author also has two books coming out this year, Mr. Mercedes and Revival.

World Book Night annually celebrates reading and books and next April 23 thousands of people in the U.S. as well as the U.K. and Ireland will go through their communities giving out free World Book Night paperbacks.

The 30 books chosen for this giveaway include well-known works of sf and fantasy – Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Stephen King’s The Stand.

World Book Night began last year in the U.K. and will be expanded to additional countries in years to come.

The date, April 23, coincides with UNESCO’s World Book Day, selected due to the anniversary of Cervantes’ death, as well as Shakespeare’s birth and death.

The cover letter 14-year-old Stephen King sent with a short story he submitted to Forry Ackerman, then editor of Spaceman Magazine, has been posted at Letters of Note. King instinctively knew he needed to butter up the editor so he paid this irresistible compliment to the magazine: “My favorite feature is the Obituary department…”

Ursula Le Guin, Stephen King, Harlan Ellison and Cory Doctorow all had something to say to the New York Timesabout digital piracy.

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

And we know Cory Doctorow doesn’t follow Harlan Ellison’s policy of eternal vigilance and legal retribution, for this very simple reason:

(1) The UK has academic fanzine collections, too. A BBC story “Fanzines enter pages of history” says “The National Library of Scotland is to embark on the laborious task of tracking down and cataloguing the countless thousands of fanzines published in the UK over the past 70 years.” That includes sf and fantasy zines. And the Beeb interviews Professor Chris Atton, whose fascination with music fanzines goes back decades.

(3) Canadians, would you rather have Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, TV cop T.J. Hooker or Boston Legal lawyer Denny Crane running your country? Well this is your lucky day – you get all three if you accept William Shatner’s offer:

“The 77-year-old star said: ‘My intention is to be Prime Minister of Canada, not Governor General, which is mainly a ceremonial position.'”

(4) The Marvel Comics version of Stephen King’s The Stand is being sold only through comics stores, not bookstores. Publishers Weekly reports:

Faced with restrictions on the distribution of its much-anticipated comics adaptation of Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic bestseller, The Stand, Marvel Comics is working to turn them into a plus. After releasing the series in periodical form in the fall of last year, Marvel announced plans to release the hardcover graphic novel, The Stand: Captain Trips, on March 10 exclusively through the comics shop market.

In fact, yes. Minor pandemonium ensued in the blogosphere this month after Quirk Books announced the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an edition of Austen’s classic juiced up with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem” by a Los Angeles television writer named Seth Grahame-Smith. (First line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”)

People who study primate behavior apparently recognize a lot of what happens in social networks as “grooming”. And you know, that makes a lot of sense. Link love is essentially a grooming activity. Us low-status monkeys indulge in mutual grooming with people we think of as allies, and we groom high-status monkeys whom we admire and whose troop we wish to belong to. High status monkeys don’t need to groom others, but may do so to reward their followers.

Little, Big spans several generations of the Drinkwater family and their relationship with the world of faerie. The concept is rescued from tweeness by author Crowley’s dazzling feats of aerobatics with the English language, which at first – especially in my tightly-typeset Methuen edition – take a bit of getting used to but, ultimately, draw you in and trap you with their beauty, not unlike the fabled world of faery itself.

The fins are finished! They were cut from solid cherry boards with my radial arm saw and trimmed up with my bandsaw. The blade on that could use some replacing…. Cherry is so hard that mostly the bandsaw blade just burns it while it’s trying to cut. Funny, burned cherry wood smells exactly like popcorn. Now I’m hungry!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster and David Klaus for the links they contributed to this article.]

King, whose Stephen King Goes to the Movies collection came out last week, doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on [Stephanie] Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains.